Cancer is a serious business, and also big business, particularly in the US. But ‘declaring war’ on it is like declaring war on death. Our own Irish Cancer Society has launched a ‘strategy statement’ that envisages a ‘future without cancer’, but it modestly concedes that ‘this may not be achieved in the lifetime of this strategy statement’.

A new study examines Ireland from medieval times in the context of social organisation, how surplus wealth is created and deployed, how literacy affects authority and how elites foster a supportive class between themselves and the masses.

At times the Irish question in its final parliamentary phase resembles a vast deserted asylum whose last inhabitants are its historians, who begin to fear that having arrived as visitors they have become confined as inmates.

Catherine O’Flynn’s new novel, which focuses on two generations of a Birmingham-Irish family and their distinct and contrasting experiences of dislocation, manages to be consistently comic yet also sad and moving.